A Novel Approach in Mine Rescue Operation using Rescue Robot

Abstract

Coal mine is a dangerous place in which many fatal factors are dangerous for human life, especially when blasts occur. Rescue persons usually don't know the actual situation of the mine tunnel under such circumstances. Therefore it can be very dangerous for rescuers to go into mine tunnels to search survivors without detecting environmental information beforehand. To solve this problem, the rescue robot is developed for assisting people to do the rescue work. The scope of this paper is to introduce the architecture of a rescue robot which is designed and implemented as a research project. Reduction of the human activities in dangerous environment is the first objective of employing the autonomous mobile robots in many applications. Mine detection is a risky action that can be done by either human or robot. Rescue robot is an autonomous three wheels robot that is designed to search through an arbitrary minefield for detecting landmines. Connection is established between the local controller on the robot and general controller that is installed at the outside of the minefield to handle the whole navigation procedure. A personal computer (PC) acts as the general controller which is responsible for mapping the landmines and determining the proper path under the mine. The local controller navigates the robot based on the feedbacks from several sensors to detect the barriers such as light sensor, IR sensor, gas sensor.